Blackberry BBM App and Suspicious Google Play Ratings 67
sl4shd0rk writes "In what could be an act of desparation of a company in it's death throes, Blackberry has submitted their BBM messaging application to Google Play for download. While this may seem like a logical path for a company on life-support, what wasn't expected is the sheer number of identical 5-star reviews the application has received since being posted. In what appears to be review 'ballot stuffing,' it poses the questions of just how Google is going to handle the subject of manufactured reviews as well as how many other entities have engaged in the same behavior. The same problems have plagued Amazon's review system as well bringing into question the validity of 'crowd based review' and whether it's possible to legitimize this type of system." The linked article points out that the suspicious posts may be the result of ballot stuffing intended to hype one of the unofficial Blackberry apps, rather than RIM's own.
Google has no clue about social spam. (Score:5, Informative)
Back in 2011, I wrote a paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social" [sitetruth.com] There, I described the social spam ecosystem, from the SEO firms to the phony account generators to the proxy sellers. I named some of the big social spammers.
Most of the same companies are still social spamming. In the paper, I mentioned "Google Plus1 Supply". [googleplus1supply.com] They're still active. They're still selling "+1"s. Their site looks almost exactly the same as in 2011. But their prices have gone down, and their number of fake "+1"s sold has increased from 4 million to 33 million. BuyPlus1Fans.com [slashdot.org] is still up.
Where do they get the accounts? BulkAccounts.com [bulkaccounts.com] is still up, just like they were two years ago. They're an outsourcing firm, using low wage labor to create new accounts. For an automated approach, there's JetBots [jetbots.com], which claims to be able to create 250,000 new accounts per day on a fast connection. They offer "CAPTCHA Bypasser", which runs CAPTCHA's through OCR, and when that doesn't work, ships them to an outsourcing firm for manual recognition. Once the account is established, their "voter bots" add any desired number of stars to reviewed items.
Facebook is no better. BulkLikes.com [bulklikes.com] is still up. In 2011, they charged $260 for 500 Facebook fans. Now, it's only $70 for 1000 fans.
Old-style link spamming was expensive - spammers had to set up content farms, run servers, refresh them with interesting content, and worry about their farm being blacklisted. Social spamming is cheap - Google, Facebook, and Yelp host the spam for free. Yelp tries to push back against social spam; they've sued some spammers. But Google and Facebook don't seem to be trying at all. The fact that the big spammers of two years ago are still big spammers clearly show this.